Once every year or so, at work we have an “International Food Day” where people bring in a dish for whatever International cuisine they felt like making. Main or dessert doesn’t matter, as long as it’s easy to get to work and share.

In the past, I made galatoboureko and this year I wanted to make profiteroles. This shot is me whisking the creme patisserie (the filling inside the profiteroles).

Leaving for work this morning…

Since we returned from our holiday, I’ve been wanting to offload all our photos from the hard disk we brought with us. However, there is 80GB of shots to dump and we don’t have any way near that much space.

I bought a brand spanking new 500GB hard disk to accommodate all of the shots; since SATA disks are the way of the future and IDE (or PATA, take your pick) I opted for one. However, all my computers are IDE only. I bought a SATA-IDE adapter (which makes the new, fast hard disk run slower, but on old hardware) as well as a new wireless router.

The wireless router replaced my network switch, old wireless router and computer which routed the Internet. The unit works fantastically and worked first time; it is just as good as the old computer, except it takes less power, doesn’t have 50GB of cache and doesn’t randomly crash due to hard disk failures.

So, using the old computer, I connected the 500GB SATA disk and found I’d been sold the wrong adapter. The next day, I returned the adapter and had another one purchased from a different shop by a work colleague who was nearby. The salesperson sold him the wrong adapter, but the same type as the one I’d been sold. The next day, we both went to the shop and explained it was the wrong unit. The salesperson claimed it was the right unit and that we just didn’t know how to use it.

We returned to the office and I connected the adapter to a computer which has both SATA and IDE connectors, and has a SATA disk already working. Moving the disk from SATA to IDE it didn’t work. Big surprise! I took the whole computer back to the store and showed them it not working. They offered me another one, and when I told them it was the wrong adapter they told me they didn’t sell the right ones and gave me a refund. Back to square one.

On the way home, I took a detour to yet another computer shop and found they had the correct adapter. I bought one and spent much of Saturday morning attempting to get it to work. The computer could “see” the new hard disk but refused to begin booting after the initial device detection (known as the POST).

Sunday, I didn’t bother with all the frustration and instead went out on a photowalk.

After work Monday I returned the adapter and instead bit the bullet and bought a new motherboard, CPU and RAM which would work with the hard disk. Ironically, it was the cheapest of each I could buy, and it’s still better than my desktop. I set everything up at home and found out the power connector didn’t fit in the new type of motherboard.

It was at this point I realised that over the past week, I’d had nothing but failures in regards to computer equipment. My magical aura seemed to be failing me and instead I broke everything I touched. This is not the first time it’s happened.

Chris was kind enough to lend Justine a laptop which refused to connect to our wireless network. It worked when security was turned off but not when any type of security was enabled. The laptop, being Windows XP SP2, should have connected without issue. We swapped from a PCMCIA wireless card to an internal MiniPCI one and the problem continued.

Finally, the tide began to turn in the right direction.

I found that you can use a 20-pin connector on a 24-pin motherboard as long as the power requirements are not high (i.e. super-duper video cards). I plugged it in and finally my fancy-pants new hard disk (along with it’s new motherboard, CPU and RAM) worked! I was able to install Windows Home Server (another topic for another post) without any issue.

Next, I found a hotfix for the wireless issue I had, which enabled me to connect the new laptop at WPA2 — the highest wireless security on my router.

Yesterday at work, a computer which had — up until the day before — been working fine was emitting a high-pitched noise when the power was connected and wouldn’t turn on; the power light on the motherboard was on though, indicating power was reaching the board. Immediately I drove to a computer shop and bought a new hard disk. The salesperson there asked me what I would do if it was the motherboard and not the power supply. “Bah,” I replied, “it will be the power supply.”

And it was.

Finally, finally my mojo hath returned after a week hiatus. I know not why, but it’s good to be back.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, yes, and it’s simply because I wanted the “Congratulations Justine” notice to stay front and centre so everyone could appreciate it.

For the past week or so, there have been a small but constant stream of ants crawling all over my desk at work. I’m constantly seeing an ant or two moving across my desk — even now as I type — and I’ll usually give them a flick or blow in their direction to fling them into something that’s on my desk.

My desk isn’t the only one with ants, and it’s not the only thing with ants in the office. The office pool cars also get ants occasionally which is not only annoying, but I’m sure incredibly dangerous. It might not sound dangerous, no, but when you are driving in traffic, and you see an ant crawling along the steering wheel, which takes your eyes off the road. Well, let’s just say it could be bad.

That’s my mini-vent for now, and I will try to get back into the habit of blogging as I will soon need to write a hell of a lot for our upcoming odyssey.

Recently I had to hire some IT staff for work, and since it’s difficult to gauge someone’s technical skills from an interview alone, I decided to create a short “quiz” or “exam” for the candidates to complete before their interview.

I intentionally made the level of the questions difficult for the sort of candidates I was expecting. As anticipated, no one got all of the questions correct. The better candidates managed to get around half correct and this was about the level that we wanted — too low and they were no good, too high and they probably didn’t really want this job anyway.

The reason for all of this blabbering is for me to link to the quiz for anyone interested to try. Print it out or whatever and see how you go.

Mike’s IT Quiz Exam Thing

Right, well it’s been three weeks since I’ve last blogged. Looking at this month it appears that I haven’t posted for longer, but rest assured, it’s only three weeks.

So, over the past three weeks I have:

• Had two new IT staff start at work.
• Had ten days off from work (including weekends).
• Played an awful lot of Neverwinter Nights 2.
• Eaten at the Box Hill Kimchi Grandma with Trav and Ange.
• Eaten at Coyote Cafe with Trav and Ange.
• Gone on a day trip with Justine to Healesville Sanctuary (some photos are on Flickr).
• Spent an afternoon with Dad and Cheryl where we ate roast chicken and cake (not at the same time).
• and probably more that I forget.

I hope this satisfies everyone’s need to know what I have been doing in this apparent time of idleness. Should you wish to know more about any topic in depth, please click the “Comment on…” link and ask.

In case you are wondering about that virus problem we had on our servers recently, it appears that it was caused by a recently-patched vulnerability in Windows servers.

When searching for possible solutions, this patch seemed to fit all the criteria but we were surprised that the local SUS server (basically a Windows Update server) hadn’t patched our servers.

This is because the guys that ran the SUS server decided to roll out the new WSUS server without telling anyone, and thought it would be easier to leave the SUS server on but not download any updates. They also told me that it wouldn’t work with our servers, but I got it working anyway.

After reconfiguration, sure enough, 10-20 minutes later all but two of our servers had downloaded and were ready to install the patch. The virus has not appeared and the problem has not occurred since. So much for communication.